"A customer called in reporting a broken cross arm on our primary," said Delores Moore, work scheduler for the local AEP office.

The resident noted the broken pole cross arm Tuesday evening along Turner Avenue, south of Wheeling Avenue, but did not notify AEP officials until Wednesday morning, Moore said.

"We sent out one of our line crew supervisors and he said it was broken off, barely hanging there," she said.

At that point the decision was made to close two circuits to allow repairs to be made. At the height of the outage, service was interrupted to 1,692 customer,s primarily in downtown Cambridge.

Service was restored around noon, Moore said.

The outage was unexpected for some affected customers. AEP reportedly issued notifications by automated calling system advising of the outage a few minutes prior to the shutdown. While many downtown businesses received the notice, employees at some reported they did not.